NCJ Number
159981
Date Published
1995
Length
9 pages
Annotation
The tradition of Russian crime reporting began with Dostoyevsky, was influenced by more factual "European" approaches, twisted by Communist ideology, and then unleashed by glasnost.
Abstract
Over its century-long history, crime reporting in Russia has always been a combination of three distinctly different approaches: an analytical one, which emphasizes the socioeconomic and psychological roots of crime; the descriptive, which provides basic facts and figures about crime with little comment; and the sensational, which focuses on the most notorious, high-profile crimes, often of a political nature. This essay refers to these three approaches respectively as the "Russian," "European," and "American" approaches. The "Russian" style of crime reporting has much to do with the writings of Dostoyevsky. Ever since "Crime and Punishment," men of letters in Russia were interested in studying the motives and circumstances that produce crime. In contrast, the "European" style of crime reporting did not have any particular source of inspiration. All big-city newspapers in 19th-Century Russia contained the "crime chronicle" section that reported all major crimes, police announcements, and overall statistics of criminal offenses, arrests, indictments, etc. The "American" or sensationalist approach was not as widespread in prerevolutionary Russian media as were analytical and descriptive ones. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought about radical changes in both the patterns of crime in Russia and its reporting. The liberal press tried to report the Bolshevik crimes but soon was silenced by the new rulers. News of common crime was reported in full, however. Stalin's ascent to power in the 1930's changed the situation once again. Under Stalin's doctrine of the withering away of crime under Communist ideology, public information about crime was made to fit this ideology. The Khrushchev era (1958-1964) saw a partial undoing of Stalin's legacy. In the events following Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985, crime reporting became more open; since 1989, general crime statistics for the whole country have been made public, revealing that the crime rate is higher than in most Western countries, except for the United States. Currently, the overall coverage of sensational crimes in Russian media is still modest by Western standards.